The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web related distribution of documents. The Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents and media through the Web. Also, as a result of the rapid expansion of the Web, E-Mail, which has been distributed for over 25 years over smaller private and specific purpose networks, has moved into distribution over the Web due to the vast distribution channels that are available.
The availability of extensive E-Mail distribution channels has made it possible to keep all necessary parties in business, government and public organizations completely informed of all transactions that they need to know about at almost nominal costs. However, there can be too much of a good thing. The availability of cheap E-Mail has led to an undesirable proliferation of E-Mail that many executive, management, professional and technical individuals are forced to handle. Our concern for this proliferation of E-Mail is not directed to conventional junk mail, i.e. E-Mail with subject matter in which the receiver has little or no interest. There are currently available a variety of application programs by which the user may filter out undesirable junk mail through the application of selected criteria appropriate to the user.
The E-Mail subject matter creating the proliferation problem to which the present invention is directed is often subject matter of great interest to the parties receiving copies or forwards of the E-Mail documents. However, problems arise when there is an exchange of E-Mail related to the same subject that may involve reply after reply or copy after copy of reply after reply. Particularly, when there are several people being copied and a thread of several E-Mails related to the subject at hand, it is sometimes quite bothersome to try to determine who received what. With the ability to attach all past E-Mail correspondence at the user's fingertips, it is frequently the case that the whole historical thread of documents is attached to each new E-Mail message even though the message may just be a couple of lines in length.
As a result, it may often be the case that an E-Mail user may find himself in a situation where a thread of E-Mail documents with a thread of ten or twelve lines of meaningful text may have to process and store ten or more times that amount of data because of superfluous attaching.
The conventional art does provide lists of the subject identifiers, e.g. headers of received E-Mail, as well as lists of headers of sent E-Mail. Also, these may be chronologically coordinated in an all E-Mail or all documents list or view. In addition, Lotus Notes™ will even cull out from its “All Documents”, lists chronologically listing the headers of a thread of E-Mail documents with the same headers. However, the user must run through the thread and pull up and view each document in the thread one by one including all of the attachments to the documents.